This etching is a second state from Plate 14 from Carceri d'Invenzioni, a series of imaginary prison interiors designed by the Roman architect, designer, and print maker, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720- 1778). This print explores the limits of the medium of etching, the technique of printmaking, and the visual and spatial limits of architectural experience itself. The etching displays a nightmarish network of arches, vaults, bridges, ramps, balconies and catwalks. Minute figures climb the infinitely recessing stairs and the endless labyrinth of machinery reduces the architectural interior to pure masonry. The Carceri is linked to Piranesi’s formative training in stage designing, as prison scenes were common in early eighteenth-century stage sets. The Carceri was first issued around 1745 but Piranesi returned to the plates in 1760, repeating echint process 10-12 times on each plante to rework their tonal contrasts. They has been interpreted as a prime example of Edmund Burke’s ideal of the sublime and this paradigm of decay, concrete and massivenss is present in his other works. This is an influential work in its afterlife as artists and writers from ranging from Joseph Mallord William Turner, Edgar Allen Poe, Victor Hugo, Sergei Eisenstein and Peter Weiss both cited Piranesi’s Carceri series as points of inspiration.

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